"She understood that talent is not enough. Talent needs to be combined with environment and community."

In a typical West Indian middle-class family, Ryan explains, children stay put until they finish their high-school education at 18. Then they go abroad, just as Ryan's mother and father had attended the University of Toronto.

"To leave at 14 was a very different thing. It broke with tradition," Ryan says.

He was born in Toronto in 1970 but was there only 30 days before his father, a university professor, took the family to Africa for three years and then on to Trinidad. (The family fled Uganda to escape the murderous regime of dictator Idi Amin, he says.)

During summer visits to the capital city of Ontario, Ryan would see the Toronto Symphony at an outdoors amphitheater. He knew immediately he wanted to be a conductor, he says.

But he had little chance of becoming one at home. Trinidad had lots of opportunities for cricket and soccer players but not classical musicians, he says.

So Ryan went to an English boarding school famous for its classical music-oriented curriculum. He found his milieu.

He faced no scary moments, he recalls, just the adjustment to being a fish in a well-stocked pond.

"I loved it. I was absolutely dying to go. It was a big adventure."

He started conducting almost immediately, earned a choral scholarship to Cambridge University (where as a tenor he performed in one of the lesser-known college choirs that sing for religious services in the colleges' chapels). Then he went to Germany's University of Tübingen in 1992 to study language and culture for a year.

"It was always my intention to return to the UK after that year, but I got my first professional gig in 1993 and it just blossomed from there. I actually never did go back."

Studies with Peter Eötvös, a leading European conductor of contemporary music, brought Ryan into contact with influential musicians. In 1999, he was named music director of the Freiburg Opera and Orchestra.

It was a cold-shower wake-up into the crazy workings of German opera houses.

"The German opera system is a very traditional path for conductors. You get a lot of repertoire — too much, I might say — in a very short period of time."

"After that engagement, I promised myself that (for) the next stage of my career I would commit myself for love, not practical reasons."

When he conducted the the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine as a guest, "I could feel the chemistry between myself and the orchestra immediately." When offered a permanent job under such conditions, it's a no-brainer to accept. This season is his first as music director.